From Mobile Tactics & App Silos to Strategy & Business Value

Why are some insurers, just like many other companies, stuck in mobile tactics and app silos with little business value?

I think it is for the same reason why many IT departments end upwith a zoo of application, complex IT environments, high TCO and poor businesssatisfaction ratings. They focus on the short term, lack a bigger vision, workin reactive mode and seem to be too busy to create better alternatives.

This is not because they are ignorant, incompetent or not professional. Overwhelmed by the mobile revolution and rapidly changing consumer preferences, many insurers have ended up playing catch-up and had to rush initiatives through to get in the game. In fact, they have often been forced to take a tactical approach to mobile and ended up with app silos and business value below expectation.

Of course, these facts are real challenges that many CIOs need to deal with. At the same time, companies who follow proven best practices are able to significantly reduce TCO and increase IT enabled business value.

Example 1: Organization with a consolidated application portfolio achieve up to 61% lower IT spend as percentage of revenue.

Example 2: Organizations where a defined and standardized value management approach towards ‘Value Realization’ has been adopted, have up to 55% higher value realized (as % of Expected Value).

In this blog I share insights about how to move from mobile tactics and app silos to strategy and business value.

Digital technology is changing the financial services industry dramatically and influencing the way we engage in the insurance business. To succeed in today’s insurance environment, insurers need an innovative digital insurance strategy that supports an Omni channel approach to attract and keep customers while combating increased competition from traditional and non-traditional players.

For me, Omni Channel (ways of bringing products or services to market) in insurance means to focus on providing a consistent, channel optimized, seamless experience that meets customer immediate needs, while delivering focused service and product recommendations, regardless of the channel or device the customer chooses to use. Mobility plays a major role here, but it is much more than just another channel. It is a business driver that enables new insurance products (e.g. “pay how you drive” car insurance policies) and business models (e.g. adding non insurance premium services that generate non-risk fee income).

While that is true it is also a fact that many insurance companies face significant pain points and challenges to fully leverage the opportunities, mobility offers.

Selected pain points and challenges for many insurance companies:

App silos as a result of short term tactics and no or limited coordination between parallel mobility initiatives

Strategy #1: Identify and focus on best-fit mobility value scenarios or use cases

Prerequisite and strategy #1 to move from mobile tactics and app silos to strategy and business value is to identify and focus on best-fit mobility value scenarios or use cases. Top performers invest time up-front in segmenting the targeted users and finding these cases.

There are 4 key areas to investigate for best-fit mobility value scenarios or use cases, including B2C(Business to Consumer), B2B (Business to Business) and B2E (Business to Employee) scenarios:

A good way to accelerate this process of identifying relevant value scenarios or use cases is to conduct a Value Discovery Workshop. In this workshop the customer team and SAP work jointly together in order to:

Strategy #2: Develop a mobility roadmap

Top performers also invest time in developing a mobility roadmap, bringing the most promising value scenarios or use cases in line with expected business value, company strategy and capabilities and resources to implement.

Strategy #3: Drive mobility end to end on a proven platform

Top performers invest in a platform approach from the outset, enabling them to address growing enterprise mobility needs in a cost-effective manner, while keeping complexity under control.

The SAP Mobile Platform provides organizations the ability to rapidly, and cost-effectively deliver user-centric mobile applications for employees, consumers and partners, with the industry’s broadest set of platform services for mobile apps that leverage open standards and drive unparalleled developer productivity.

Development teams a flexible app development platform that accelerates productivity via open standards and customer’s existing third party development tools, as well as a rich community of resources

Business leaders a proven and future-ready solution from a company they trust

Strategy #4 (Bonus): Take part in the Enterprise Mobility Benchmarking survey to quickly evaluate your organizations status-quo on mobility and to explore proven best practices. You find the survey on our online Value Management & Benchmarking Platform (valuemanagement.sap.com). Once you are logged in go to “Surveys Catalog” => “Technology Innovations” => “Enterprise Mobility”. Participation is free of charge.

The purpose of this survey is to explore best practices for establishing and maintaining an efficient and effective mobile environment, and to understand the value proposition of the mobile enterprise. The survey explores key performance indicators on the business as well as the IT side. The survey also reviews best practices in creating mobile applications and connecting them to data sources, so they are controllable and consumable on the user’s device of choice.